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October 27, 2009

During his keynote to the Workday Rising conference last week (www.workdayrising.com), the partner for enterprise strategy at Altimeter Group, R “Ray” Wang (www.twitter.com/rwang0), picked up on part of Collaborative Solutions’ implementation philosophy. Our approach to minimize time to value and fully utilize consumer-oriented web native software supports more rapid implementation timelines with less up-front and maintenance costs. Ray’s comments led me to reflect on the changes in technology and work environments.

 
During the initial European client server ERP generation implementations, I was working with a large UK utility company. Our data conversion had been proved, functionality was configured, and the users were excited about moving off the legacy mainframe. Back then the definition of a mainframe involved an IBM 370 and lots of green screens.

 
We suddenly hit a seemingly insurmountable road block. Despite the fact we had fully cataloged and developed the 50 or so “essential” hard copy reports and spent months designing and tailoring screen input and output, the users were struggling with the fact there was no button to print a screen of information. Long and impassioned discussions debated the need to print a page immediately (and no, pasting a screen image into a word doc would not do!).

 
Fast forward to Ray’s keynote, describing the ever-changing, web 2.0, millennial-friendly work environment of today (“Move fast and break things” as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg famously says). Gone is the need for users to take data out of the system in a plethora of reports for it to be useful. Users are becoming the true data owners and drivers of a systems operation and application.

 
Increasingly, laptop and mobile technologies are untethering systems from IT-policed and -controlled environments.  At Workday Rising we saw how Workday’s manager and employee self-service UI and dynamic reporting enable live data in the system to be an integrated, on-demand, part of the work environment rather than a delayed reflection of it.

 
Inevitably the occasional need to produce proforma presentations of data will arise, but these occasions are becoming fewer. Hence our approach is to include just a couple of custom reports per implementation. Gone is the need to do a last-minute screen print for a meeting when you can show the live data.
The irony of course is that Workday actually has the ability to produce a PDF “print” or Excel sheet for most pages, but that’s part of a much wider discussion on integration of HR data into the enterprise…